“Pray, but when you pray, move your feet.” – African proverb

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DISCLAIMER: This post is a bit philosophical. An area of life I am extremely unqualified in and have little interest. However, I am at the crossroads of another transition; therefore thinking more deeply about my life than usual.

Comparing life or aspects of life to a puzzle has probably been done a million times, but it’s a metaphor that holds true. I think about all the events, experiences, and people in my life and how they’ve enriched me, allowed me to grow, and ultimately expanded my “puzzle”. It’s as if each life event is a piece in an ongoing puzzle, each experience slowly adding to the beauty and complexity of a life. As human being (and planning obsessed, borderline OCD human being), it’s easy to try and fit puzzle pieces together. I think I know what’s best for me and which new place or job or school I’m going to next. While just like putting together a puzzle requires some planning and effort, we also can’t force a puzzle piece to fit, it will look odd and eventually ruin the image. Sometimes, finding the right piece is easy. The first one we grab locks in place perfectly. But more often, it takes piece after piece of careful fitting before the right piece is found. We think we know the color scheme and shape, but so frequently the right piece is surprising until we see the whole picture.

The last two years of my life were not a time of effortlessly finding the next puzzle piece, as much as I tried every single application that might be the right “fit”. Instead it was a time of learning to be patient and enjoy the pieces of life that were already fitting together rather than looking forward to completing the picture. I never would have guessed that I would spend a year teaching English in South Korea after laboring over an engineering degree, I might have guessed that I would spend five months in Uganda, but in no way could I plan the people I would meet and how it would change my life. Even my OCD grad school search was a period of waiting for the perfect fit. No matter how much I planned, stressed, and obsessed, I couldn’t force my acceptance or scholarship offer.

Yet all of my waiting and random unplanned adventures have only made my unfinished puzzle more colorful and rich. I can’t imagine life without the wonderful people I met in Korea, I can’t imagine life without my Ugandan experience. God is the ultimate puzzle maker, He knows exactly how all the pieces will fit one step at a time, and He knows exactly how the finished product will turn out. While, I will probably never completely stop planning and obsessing, I am grateful for how all the pieces have fallen together in ways I could never plan, and I am grateful for how each “piece” or experience has shaped who I am.

Usually when I mention Uganda or another African country to your average American (or Korean) their eyes glaze over, and once they’ve figured out that Uganda is in the continent (country) of Africa I can see images of starving and emaciated children, millions of people living with AIDS and elephants and lions flash through their minds. A typical conversation might go something like this:

“Oh you’re working in AFRICA? Wow! That must be so hard with all the diseases and starving children.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“How fulfilling to be able to save so many lives. You’re so brave to be there!”

The conversation might continue to mention someone they know doing a short term mission trip to “Africa” and how wonderful it was, but if you try and mention any other details about “Africa” and how perhaps it’s more than just starving children, AIDS, malaria, and unique animals, the person will lose interest.

Why many people can’t seem to grasp the concept that Africa is a continent made of up of many, many individual and unique countries with separate cultures, languages, and customs frustrates me. But what what frustrates me more is the perception of Africa (that the media only reinforces) as a continent just riddled with poverty and disease, corrupt leaders, but filled many beautiful animals like the lion “king of the jungle” (thank you Disney for confusing jungle and grassland). Of course none of these perceptions are inaccurate per se. I live in a place where people do die of hunger, where on almost a daily basis one of our staff gets sick with malaria (which actually isn’t that big of a deal if you receive treatment), and where almost all the Ugandans I know have lost a child or a young relative prematurely. I can’t gloss over the fact that all the African countries I’ve been to are filled with hardship that we can barely dream of in the western world. But they are also filled with so much more than hardship. To characterize an entire continent so negatively is the same as when people ask me if all Americans carry guns to school. Sadly, there are people who carry guns to school and shootings do happen, but of course there is so much more to the United States than shootings, McDonalds, New York City and LA, and fat people.

The “Africa” I know is filled with people just living. Just like in every other country I’ve visited, people in Uganda have families, they fall in love, they have favorite foods, they laugh, they cry, and they enjoy life. Even in the midst of harder living conditions than we have in the west people are still living. Yes, there are corrupt governments but people have still found a way to get by. When I read the news about the state of government affairs in the US, I find myself disgusted, but when I’m living there I realize it’s not as bad as the media presents. Yes, there are many people living with AIDS (particularly in Southern Africa), but there are even more people living without AIDS and many people fighting to stop the spread of AIDS. Yes, there are many unemployed people who are barely scraping by, but there are also many people who have regular jobs, who work hard, who send their kids to school to give them a better life, and people who have hope for their country and want to stay and make a difference.

I’ve only been to a handful of African countries and each one possesses a slightly different set of struggles, different languages, slightly different animals, vastly different geographies, different cultures, different beliefs, different political systems, different dress, and simply different ways of life. The African continent is arguably the most diverse culturally and certainly linguistically, yet this is not the Africa that most people know. Instead of only seeing Africa as a place with famine and drought, disease and despair, corruption and power struggles, my hope is that people would see it as a continent filled with people full of life and ideas, bright and colorful culture, music, and art, and landscapes and animals that are a photographer’s dream. Just as it’s unfair to characterize America by obesity, fast food, and guns, it’s unfair to characterize Africa by only the negative.